Open source · 2024
tinyqueue
A job queue for edge functions that fits in 4 kB, with retries, delays and no server to run. 2,400 stars and used in production by teams I've never met.
- Client
- Open source
- Role
- Author and maintainer
- Year
- 2024
- Stack
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- Deno
- GitHub Actions
The brief
Every project I built needed a few background jobs (send this email in ten minutes, retry that webhook) and every queue I found wanted its own server. tinyqueue keeps jobs in the Postgres you already have and runs them from your edge functions.
What made it hard
- No server and no extra service
- At-least-once delivery, and honest about it
- Small enough to read in an afternoon
Results
- Size, minified and gzipped
- After: 4 kB
- GitHub stars
- After: 2,400
- Weekly downloads
- After: 31,000
- Open issues
- After: 6
How it was built
tinyqueue started as forty lines in a client project and grew because other people kept asking for it.
Jobs in the database you have
A job is a row. Workers claim rows with FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, so two functions never take the same job, and a job that isn’t finished in time goes back to the queue. No Redis, no broker, no dashboard to keep alive.
Small, and staying small
The library has one rule: it must fit in 4 kB. Every feature request is weighed against it, which has made for better features and a lot of polite no’s.
